And their boy, Sam Crawford, is the face of the threat.
Tuesday, he will deliver the goods to his pals who pay him behind the scenes as their "consultant."
Crawford and company are out to vest more rights for you to buy back in the future. Pay attention, fellow taxpayers. Once again the usual suspects are posing as populists to get theirs at your expense.
If county residents don't start thinking, they will wake up wondering why the sheriff doesn't show up when they call; asking where the firefighters are while the barn burns; and wishing someone, anyone, would protect the place we love while all the time we pay a landed gentry not to further subdivide the county's farms and forests because this council gave them the "rights" to do so.
Just as Tea Party troops nationally have been tricked into believing "regulation" and "government" are our biggest problems, local voters, frustrated by the growing pressures that followed the financial collapse, are being convinced zoning regulation is the problem.
But in fact, it's fat cats and special interests who have taken over government and are (and plan to continue) milking us like their own little herd.
And with the local building industry folks, chamber of commerce crew, and the rest of the country club set controlling county government, while they butter their bread they want you to believe regulating them costs jobs. They want you to think regulating them is not only economically unwise, but unconstitutional and downright un-American.
They may not like it, but again just this year, writing for what is unquestionably the most conservative Supreme Court majority we've known, Justice Scalia explained that property rights are not anything more than the rights granted by the States. They are not some divine legacy.
Scalia wrote for the majority,
“The takings clause only protects property rights as they are established under state law, not as they might have been established or ought to have been established.”And following Lucas v. S.Carolina Coastal Council, Scalia continued,
"a regulation that deprives a property owner of [even] all economically beneficial use of this property is not a taking if the restriction inheres in the title itself, in the restrictions that background principles of the State's law of property and nuisance already place upon land ownership." [emphasis added]In the state of Washington, the restrictions that inhere in title to its lands include the protections created by the Growth Management Act.
Notwithstanding the decades long battle by property rights true-believers opposed to this legislation passed in the early '90s, and their use of political connections with the county administration to vest alleged rights to subdivide and build; because the county has refused to follow the law, Whatcom county is routinely defeated in this effort to avoid the law.
All this will place future county governments in the unattractive situation of having to unwind the wrong doing in the face of angry citizens unwilling to give up windfalls created by extra-legal means like the effort you will witness Tuesday.
You see, the problem with government is it's been taken away from the people by the very forces that government was meant to regulate to protect the people. And those forces have one thing in mind, profit themselves while leaving us with the costs and/or getting government to tax its citizens and pay them.
To that end they want to make believe their title to some land puts them above the law, or that the law abridges some right or freedom they allege is being violated.
Again, in our state, the whole sorry thing started years ago with passage of the Growth Management Act, intended to safeguard farmland, forests, critical areas and other resources necessary to conserve and protect the traditional industries that rely on them; industries that had long supported real jobs.
In Whatcom County the law was met with disdain by politically influential landowners grown accustomed to converting these resource lands, at great profit, into sprawling residential developments uncharacteristic of the rural county; often replacing pastures and cropland with golf courses surrounded by what have come to be called "McMansions" given their similarity to the ubiquitous structures elsewhere polluting the landscape wherever we go.
The landed gentry immediately got control of the zoning process locally. The upshot? Instead of protecting lands as the Act intended, the landed gentry managed to gerrymander the zoning map and set themselves up for the future. And they elected themselves a county council that became notorious in the state as reactionaries.
Basically to get around the law, these folks created excessively large areas for more intense development in forests and farmland, including a nice little piece for our current county executive.
They designated other resource lands, near the county's cities, for urban growth to the great satisfaction of landowners, many of whom had acquired the land speculating on future growth, that was now to be protected under the new state law.
Relevant to the giveaway planned for Tuesday, the state board created to interpret and rule on matters related to growth found the areas the development community created around smaller cities to be excessively large and would lead to sprawl inconsistent with preserving the rural character as the Act mandated.
As a consequence, the county's planning department was sent back to the drawing board to re-size these urban growth areas. After months and months of work, the areas were better planned and the county council, after much debate, approved that plan.
Of course the landed gentry challenged the zoning decision, and of course they again lost in court.
But the building industry, and landowners left out, didn't give up and invested heavily in electing new council members who would see things their way. Succeeding at that, their new council appointed planning commissioners that could be counted on to rubber stamp policies and proposals put forward by the land speculation community. And they lobbied Kremen successfully to drive out the planning director and give them free reign over the department.
Now, this group and their representatives on the council, plan to undue the work ordered by the state and enlarge the zones once again without any effort to rationalize their scheme to the Act or allow meaningful public process.
Next, the developers' council will be re-writing the Comprehensive Plan in an attempt to redefine rural character so they can retain the zoning densities in rural areas the state has already objected to and ruled against.
Besides making us something of a laughing stock around the state, this persistent, feigned ignorance of the law costs us hours and hours of human resource time to undo and redo staff work. Which work has little or no chance of meeting approval beyond the representatives of the local development fraternity.
But the real losers in this will be Whatcom county taxpayers. The developers haven't really got any immediate plans to build anything. But they are in a hurry to vest the rights to do so. For you see, the free lunch these fat cats are after is getting in line for the hand out of development rights taxpayers will be forced to redeem for years to come.
The time has come to understand the difference between a public relations campaign and a public outcry. The main course at Tuesday's free lunch will be your taxes re-directed to the propagandists.
